Break out your reading glasses, this is the tiniest version of Pacman I’ve ever seen. After you start to go blind, use Window’s Accessories/Accessibility/Magnifier application to make things easier.

So I finally ordered Vonage. I’d been flirting with the idea for over a year. But I kept rationalizing myself out of it, and continued to spend around $60 a month for crappy old Bell South. Russ had some issues with his service a while ago, mostly when uploading really huge files. As I don’t do that, and after hearing glowing reviews from friends at work who switched, I decided it was time.

It really couldn’t have been simpler. I signed up, they shipped me a box, I followed the simple instructions, and it all worked. The only slow part is having my old phone transferred to this new service, which supposedly takes about 20 days. But aside from that delay, it rawks!

Audio quality is the same, and I consider myself to have sensitive and discerning ears. There is ever so slightly more background noise/hiss, but I was already dealing with that because of my cordless phone. And the issue of wall-power dependency is solved by my computer’s UPS (although I only get about an hour of backup juice). If I ever have an extended power outage, chances are good the phone lines are down as well. And besides, I have my cell phone.

Check out this link to explore and signup. You and I will both get a free month of service.

Well, I’ve had this sitting around for a while and I realized I could just post it for whoever’s use. I’m pretty sure this is not an original idea anymore, but when I wrote it back in 2002 I don’t think too many people were doing it.

This resume tool takes a single XML file which represents the information in your resume or C.V, and generates a HTML, text, and PDF version all at once. So you only need to edit stuff in one place, saving you time and reducing errors. This magic is done with XSL, which isn’t so magical anymore, but still very cool.

I’m processing these files with Xalan, Jakarta’s XSLT engine, although any compliant XSLT processor should work. I’m using Jakarta’s FOP for PDF generation. Enjoy, but please use your own resume.xml, these are my life’s experiences, not yours.

XML file
XSL file for HTML
XSL file for text
XSL file for PDF

org.apache.xalan.xslt.Process <del>IN resume.xml -XSL resume</del>txt.xsl -OUT resume.txt

You can see the output in the resume section of this site.

After a few days of good entertainment, I finished up [[amazon:B0000D12XI Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne]] last week.

The first Max Payne was quite excellent, it broke several boundaries. It was the first noir first-person-shooter, if not game, that I was ever aware of. The voice-acting, the environment design, the storyboard narration, all made for a very unique gaming experience.

The sequel doesn’t really add all that much in creativity. Technically the game is more advanced due to the 2+ year advance in technology. Where the first game’s stylized narration worked (in a peculiar way), I was rolling my eyes quite a few times in this one. This game also felt noticably shorter than the original.

All in all, it was enjoyable to play. No big surprises, I guess I just expected to outshine its ancestor.

I just paid for a 6 months of Digitally Imported’s new Premium subscription service. I’ve been listening to Digitally Imported for a while now, at least since Tag’s Trance Trip dried up because of the CARP ruling.

I was listening to the trance channel this evening when I noticed that the upper frequencies seemed a bit dull. Turns out they’ve limited the public channels down to 96kbps from 128. Upon investigating, I found that Digitally Imported has recently launched a subscription service. 12 dollars a month is a bit steep but I listen a LOT while I’m home, so it seems like a pretty good deal. Plus they offer a 160kbps stream, so it sounds great!!

Check them out if you like electronica, they’re THE place on the net these days. I highly recommend them, too bad my stream ripper doesn’t know how to connect now that they’re authenticating paid users. I’d love to save some of this music that I’m paying to listen to.